The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda

Nintendo’s new video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reimagines the beloved series.

COURTESY NINTENDO

The video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once called the land of Hyrule “a miniature garden that you can put into a drawer and revisit anytime you like.” Miyamoto conceived Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, in 1986, and though its layout has changed often in the intervening decades, its ambiance of bucolic, occasionally threatening whimsy hasn’t. Neither has the company’s understanding of Zelda’s essential purpose: to bring the great outdoors—the rollicking hills, the whispering caves, all that breezy, alfresco escapade—indoors. In recent years, Miyamoto, who is now sixty-four, has retreated to the position of Zelda’s overseer, relinquishing control to younger directors inside the clandestine, Willy Wonka-esque factory that is Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters. (In 2010, Nick Paumgarten made it farther than most—to a conference room just inside the gates.) But Hyrule remains indelibly his. Indeed, it is based on Miyamoto’s boyhood experiences roaming the countryside around Sonobe, Japan.

The Legend of Zelda is, alongside Super Mario, a crown jewel in Nintendo’s hundred-year-old enterprise. Perhaps for this reason, the series has evolved cautiously. Each game has had a protagonist named Link, a villain named Ganon, and a princess named Zelda. Link, in the course of his adventures, always discovers a similar set of tools—winged sandals, a boomerang, a bow and arrow, cartoonish bombs—with which he must unlock progressively more complicated dungeons. The series offers a vision of heroism from a simpler era, one made contemporary by the new hardware on which Link’s story recurringly unfolds. For years, the approach worked. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the first game in which Hyrule became three-dimensional, sold almost eight million copies, and millions more in rereleases. Since 2006, however, the lustre of the series has faded. So-called open-world games, which present a player with huge swaths of space ripe for nonlinear exploration—settings like The Witcher 3’s Toussaint, a topographical tribute to Provence, or Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos, an architectural approximation of Los Angeles—grew in popularity. Nintendo’s classical approach to interactive storytelling began to feel anachronistic, or at least unfashionable.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please. Almost all of Link’s abilities—most of which are new to this game, and which grant players the wizard-like abilities to stop time, freeze water, and levitate objects—are acquired within the first hour’s play. If you want to trot off to the final encounter with Ganon, ignoring everything else, that’s fine. If you want to while away the hours catching and training wild horses, so be it. If you want to become a wildlife photographer, meticulously chronicling every animal, insect, and fish, that’s your choice. Breath of the Wild is a game that contorts itself to accommodate every interest and predilection. The result is a marvel. The game’s director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, told me recently that Miyamoto and other Nintendo executives gave his team carte blanche. “They said, ‘Change anything you want,’ ” Fujibayashi recalled. “So we wrote down all of the stress points, the things that make Zelda games less enjoyable, and we replaced them with new ideas.”

In Breath of the Wild, Link and Zelda inhabit a newly expansive Hyrule.

COURTESY NINTENDO

Most video games are built on a physics engine, a set of hard-coded rules for how a fictive world works. Breath of the Wild is no exception, but its physics engine is overlaid with what the development team describes as a chemistry engine. Brandish a flaming torch in a patch of dry grass and the fire will spread. Don a metal helmet in a thunderstorm and you may attract a head-wrecking bolt. In this Hyrule, the rain makes stone surfaces slick and difficult to climb. And in this Hyrule Link can cook. Meat cut from the carcasses of birds and animals, fruit knocked from trees, and mushrooms plucked from the tall grass can be combined to produce meals and ability-enhancing elixirs. The game’s systems, none of which are necessarily new but all of which are delivered with Nintendo’s characteristic elegance and wit, interlock snugly, allowing players to approach familiar puzzles in new and diverse ways—a technique the team refers to as multiplicative gameplay.

“At many times in the process, there were things that just weren’t functioning at all,” Takuhiro Dohta, the game’s technical director, told me. “We’d have to remove everything and build back up again.” The team proceeded with trepidation, Fujibayashi admitted, knowing that they were, at least in part, tearing up Miyamoto’s original blueprint. Then, midway through production, Satoru Iwata, Miyamoto’s friend and mentor and Nintendo’s well-loved president, died, suddenly and unexpectedly. “When he passed away, there were moments we’d come up with an idea which we’d be excited to talk to Iwata about,” Fujibayashi told me. “Then we’d remember he was no longer here. Miyamoto told me it was the same for him. He’d come up with an idea at the weekend and would feel excited to speak to Iwata about it on Monday, only to remember. The sadness runs deep. This is approaching spiritual talk, but we had the sense that he was watching over our work. That became a source of motivation, a drive for us to improve and be better.”

While the refashioned Zelda is available for Nintendo’s aging Wii-U, it is best enjoyed on the new Switch, the most boldly designed video-game console since the original Wii. The machine’s gimmick, which turns out to be its quiddity, is that it has its own small display, meaning that it works equally well plugged into the TV or as a handheld device. This allows you to continue your game on the go or, as I have discovered, in bed. Fornication’s loss is the imagination’s gain. Breath of the Wild spills its garden from the drawer onto the pillow. For those who use the worlds conjured by novels as springboards to sleep, be warned: this is no replacement. Hyrule does not soothe but agitates the spirit. There is too much story here waiting to be written.